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Tracing an awe-inspiring oceanic route from Boston, around Cape Horn, to the California coast, Two Years Before the Mast is both a riveting story o...

Harriet Beecher Stowe's timeless and moving novel, an incendiary work that fanned the embers of the struggle between free and slave states into the...

The dramatic autobiographical account of Booker T. Washington’s unique American experience—a struggle against social and ideological bias that he b...

They are the fearful images that have stalked humanity’s nightmares for centuries, supernatural creatures that feast on flesh and haunt the soul, m...

Fleeing an unhappy past in England, penniless Lucy Snowe starts life anew at a boarding school in cosmopolitan Villette, a stand-in for Brussels. T...

Henry David Thoreau reflects on life, politics, and society in these two inspiring masterworks: Walden and Civil Disobedience. In 1845, Thoreau mov...

Back when New York was still young, so was heiress Catherine Sloper. A simple, plain girl, she grew up in opulence with a disappointed father and a...

Ayn Rand's first published novel, a timeless story that explores the struggles of the individual against the state in Soviet Russia. First publ...

Whether they listen to Mozart or Duke Ellington, Aaron Copland invites readers to ask two basic questions: Are they hearing everything that is goin...

Martin Luther King’s classic exploration of the events and forces behind the Civil Rights Movement—including his Letter from Birmingham Jail, April...

Winesburg, Ohio, gave birth to the American story cycle, for which William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and later writers were forever indebted. ...

From Kate Chopin’s turn-of-the-century Lousiana, to Gertrude Stein’s war-time Paris, to Alice Walker’s modern-day America, here are twenty-six shor...

“Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.”There are few more convincing, less sentimental accounts of passionate love than Wu...